1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information storage disk dispensing apparatus. More particularly, the present invention relates to an information storage disk dispensing apparatus that vertically dispenses disks onto a tray of a disk drive with a disk inclining member to incline the dispensed disk to prevent the dispensed disk from colliding with the drive before the dispensed disk contacts the tray.
2. Description of Related Art
Information storage disks, such as compact disks (CDs) including Compact Disc-Recordable (CD-R), Compact Disc ReWritable (CD-RW), DVD recordable (DVD-R) etc. are popular and are used to store digital information in a variety of formats. Disk dispensing apparatus has been developed to provide or feed one disk once for disk replication devices, disk vending machines etc. to use or sell.
For convenient purposes, automatic disk dispensing apparatus becomes more common. The automatic disk dispensing apparatus uses a disk feeding mechanism or a robot arm to transport or feed one disk such as a blank compact disk onto a tray to duplicate or sell. One kind of the automatic disk dispensing apparatus feeds the disk vertically onto the tray i.e. the disk is pulled by gravity to fall down onto the tray when the disk is released from the disk feeding mechanism or the robot arm.
Refer to FIG. 1. For example, for an automatic disk duplication system, a disk drive 100 such as a compact disk drive or a burner is positioned under the disk dispensing apparatus to receive a fallen disk 200 in its tray 110 so that the disk drive 100 could read or write the disk 200. The tray 110 is retractably mounted in a body 120 of the disk drive 100 and has a receiving area 111 to receive and hold the disk 200 in position. The receiving area 111 is generally a circular recess with a diameter grater than the diameter of the disk 200. Typically, when the tray 110 is ejected out of the body 120, the receiving area 111 is not completely exposed out of the body 120. A small inside portion 112 is still hidden by the body 120.
However, the disk 200 has to be aligned with the receiving area 111 so as to be exactly received and held in the receiving area 111 when the disk 200 is pulled to fall vertically by gravity. Since the hidden inside portion 112 and the needs of alignment between the disk 200 and the receiving area 111, the edge of the falling disk 200 will collide with the top corner 121 of the body 120 before the disk 200 contacts with the tray 110. Hence, the falling disk 200 deviates from its path of motion and cannot be received by the receiving area 111. Automatic operations are stopped following the collision and cannot be executed.
Therefore, there is a need to provide an improved disk dispensing apparatus for information storage disks to mitigate or obviate the aforementioned problems.